


Books and Libraries

by welkinalauda (iiii)



Series: Salvaged from Tumblr [11]
Category: Tumblr - Fandom, supernatural meta - Fandom
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-21
Updated: 2019-02-21
Packaged: 2019-11-01 17:16:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17871455
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iiii/pseuds/welkinalauda
Summary: Folks were talking yesterday/today [September 22, 2015] about Dean and reading (thread from here: http://cockleddean.tumblr.com/post/124510994628/do-you-ever-think-about-sam-and-cas-sharing-books), and it got me thinking.





	Books and Libraries

When they got to traveling all the time, John would have said, books are bulky, books are heavy.  Books are pretty delicate, too - it doesn’t take much carelessness to reduce one to sodden pieces, especially when the readers are little kids in an enclosed space.  So the Winchesters can’t be carrying a lot of them around.  John would have (maybe) been gracious enough to keep a bedtime book or two, but he’d have pruned them the second they were outgrown.  And books cost money, so he wouldn’t have been buying new ones.  No accumulated mobile library for Dean or Sam.

TV, though, even the very cheap motels tend to have a tv chained to the wall.  Reception’s a gamble, especially as you get up into the mountains, but the shows are the same everywhere.  You can keep following the story no matter where you are.

There’s a public library in every town in the US.  (That’s how you can tell a town from a  wide spot in the road - whether there’s a library.)  The librarians try to discourage people from using them as free child care, but people do it anyway.  John Winchester certainly would have, as much as he could get away with.  Be a lot more wholesome environment than the motel rooms he rented.

Certain books are like tv shows, in that they are available everywhere.  Pretty much every library will have a full set of Agatha Christie, and a representative array of Asimov.  Twain.  RL Stevenson.    

If a peripatetic teenaged boy wanted to, he could occupy a spare twenty minutes before collecting his little brother by plucking a book off the shelf and reading.  If he chose his book well, he’d be able to keep reading the next library’s copy of the same book, and the next library, and the next, as they moved around the country.  In this manner, a teenaged boy could (very slowly) piecemeal his way through Vonnegut’s greatest hits.  

And then maybe the barely-adolescent little brother tells the teenaged boy to stop creeping around the library?  The little brother’s not a baby any more, doesn’t need to be watched, that sort of thing.  And rather than explain  _not watching but reading_ , the teenaged boy would put up mock-resistance and afterward leave the library as his little brother’s territory, not to be intruded on without an invitation.  They’ve both got little enough privacy as it is, and it’s not like the teenaged boy would be giving up anything he really needs.

He never does finish  _Life on the Mississippi_ , though.


End file.
